AVweb Insider

Inside a windowless cubicle beneath the FAA’s Oklahoma City HQ, there’s a GS-12 federal employee named Katherine “Kate” Strauss, who catalogues aviation fears. Her job isn’t to invent them, nor to act upon the infinite varieties. We pilots do that. She merely assigns labels to the willie-givers that make us choose “No-Go” when “Go” might’ve […]

I was talking with Alan Klapmeier the other week about a topic we both hold, if not near and dear, then certainly in the top five reasons why general aviation remains such a frustrating backwater. The story he told me related directly to the slow-motion train wreck we’re watching as the industry stumbles toward finding […]

As a journalistic enterprise, video interviews like the one I did with Bruce Landsberg last week on the Dale Snodgrass crash have one glaring fault that reminds me of eating green bananas. You usually have to publish them before they’ve had a chance to ripen and once in the wild, there’s no practical way to […]

Aviation got a boost, and I almost missed it. Buried amid the morning hog futures, my local radio station reported that Iowa’s governor, Kim Reynolds (not a pilot), signed a bill eliminating the 7 percent sales tax on airplane parts and labor. While encouraging, there was no mention if aircraft other than airplanes were included […]

Is it better to be lucky than good? False choice. Cover the board and aim for both lucky and good, although this philosophical mobius strip leads to the inevitable conclusion that skill has a lot to do with making luck. I’m blathering on about this because just six months ago I wrote a blog explaining […]

The expression, “Got the surprise of my life,” loses credibility when the speaker shouldn’t be that surprised, e.g., “Got the surprise of my life and passed the check ride.” Congratulations, but why surprised? When an instructor preps a client properly for an exam, then neither applicant nor examiner should be surprised at success. I’d be concerned […]

One of the many things I inherited from my father, in addition to his volcanic impatience, is a predilection for planning, especially contingency planning. Aviation, for me, has honed that obsession into a habit of preloading decision making. By that, I mean I like to think through what difficult decisions I might have to make […]

In the world of mass production things, 25,000 is not a very big number. It’s about an hour’s worth of iPhone production and an eyeblink in the trillions of metal oxide transistors that make gadgets like that possible. Ford makes that many F-150s in about 10 days and Tesla does a few more than that […]

It’s possible you’ve never heard of the legendary pilot, Ann Dearing Holtgren Pellegreno. But you should have. In 2019, Ann received the FAA’s Wright Brothers’ Master Pilot Award for a lifetime of aviation achievements. Swell, but who hasn’t? Me, for one and for good reason. The FAA, my favorite former employer I love to disparage, […]

When last I worked myself into a virtual lather over the glacial non-progress of the stupidly over complicated process of finding an unleaded aviation fuel, I allowed as how I had grown old watching this process. I’m two months older now and still, nothing has happened.   At Sun ‘n Fun, George Braly told us […]